# Your first budget

Set aside an amount for one department over a year, put the budget in service and read what the books have already spent against it, without typing a single actual figure.

A budget sets an amount aside for a period and for a part of the firm, a department or a project, and then shows what is really spent against it. You type the plan; the actual figures come from the entries already posted in the books. This walk-through builds a budget for the Legal department for 2026 and reads it.

## Before you start {#before-you-start}

- You need the **Administrator** access right on **Accounting** to create a budget and put it in service. The **Read-only** access right shows the budgets and their figures and changes nothing.
- The parts of the firm a budget watches are analytic accounts, grouped in analytic plans: the demo company has a **Departments** plan with **Legal**, **Administrative**, **Finance** and other departments. An expense counts against a department when its bill or entry line carries that department in its analytic distribution. The plans and accounts are under **Accounting/Configuration/Analytic Accounting/Analytic Plans** and **Accounting/Configuration/Analytic Accounting/Analytic Accounts**.
- The demo books already hold two posted Legal expenses in 2026: a legal research subscription of 24,000.00 in April and court fees of 22,000.00 in June.

## Step 1: the budgets list {#budgets-list}

Open **Accounting/Accounting/Budgets/Analytic Budgets**. Each line is a budget with its **Period Start**, **Period End**, what it **Applies To**, and three totals: **Planned**, **Actual** and **Available**. The **Stage** badge says where it stands. A line turns red when its actual amount passes its planned amount. The card view groups the budgets by stage, with a bar of actual against planned.

Click **New**.

![The analytic budgets with their period, planned, actual and available amounts; New adds a budget.](https://jaah.app/web/image/9684-09f7c6fc/budgets-first-budget-budgets_list-en.png)

## Step 2: name the budget and its period {#title-and-period}

Type a **Budget Title** people recognise, such as `Budget demo: legal 2026`, then the **Period Start** and the **Period End**: here 01/01/2026 and 31/12/2026. Only the entries dated inside the period count.

**Responsible** is filled with your name: the person who answers for keeping the budget within its amount. Change it if someone else owns the budget.

![The title of the budget and the period it covers, here the year 2026.](https://jaah.app/web/image/9688-918c56aa/budgets-first-budget-budget_period-en.png)

## Step 3: say what it watches and when to warn {#governance}

**Applies To** chooses the side of the profit and loss the budget reads: **Spending** (the default) for the expense accounts, **Income** for the income accounts, **Both Sides** for the two together. Keep **Spending** for a department's costs.

In **Governance**, **Enforcement** records how strictly the ceiling is meant: **Warn When Exceeded** (the default), **Informative Only** or **Refuse When Exceeded**. It is a statement of intent: the field's own help says the module observes only, and nothing is warned about or refused when an entry is posted.

**Alert At (%)** is the share of the plan from which a line is shown as near its ceiling, 90 by default. Type `80` here, so that the warning comes earlier.

![Enforcement and Alert At (%), the share of the plan from which a line is shown as near its ceiling.](https://jaah.app/web/image/9692-ededf56e/budgets-first-budget-budget_governance-en.png)

## Step 4: add a budget line {#budget-line}

In the **Budget Items** tab, click **Add a line**. The line has one column per analytic plan of the database, such as **Project** and **Departments**. Choose **Legal** in the **Departments** column and leave the other dimension columns empty. Write what the line covers in **Note** (`Court fees and research`) and the amount in **Planned**: `55000`.

A line must name at least one analytic account, and one budget cannot hold the same combination twice: a second Legal line in this budget is refused, because each would claim the whole Legal spending. Raise the amount of the existing line instead.

![One budget line, the Legal department with its planned amount and a note.](https://jaah.app/web/image/9696-564b22cb/budgets-first-budget-budget_line-en.png)

## Step 5: put the budget in service {#put-in-service}

Open **Actions** and choose **Put in Service**. The budget is saved and its stage moves from **Draft** to **Open**. From now on the line reads its figures from the posted entries:

- **Actual**: 46,000.00, the two Legal expenses of 2026.
- **Available**: 9,000.00, what is left of the plan.
- **Consumption**: 83.64%, the actual amount over the planned one. It passed the 80% you chose, so the line is drawn in orange; it would turn red above 100%.
- **Expected to Date**: what should have been spent by today if the money went out evenly over the year. Compare it with **Actual** to see whether spending runs ahead of the calendar.

Each new expense posted with the Legal department alone and dated in 2026 changes these figures as soon as it is posted; nobody types them.

![The budget in service; the line reads its actual amount from the posted entries and shows the consumption.](https://jaah.app/web/image/9700-95f6ca97/budgets-first-budget-budget_in_service-en.png)

## Step 6: back to the list {#back-to-the-list}

Open **Accounting/Accounting/Budgets/Analytic Budgets** again. The new budget is there, **Open**, with its planned, actual and available totals. **Accounting/Accounting/Budgets/Budget Items** shows the lines of every budget side by side.

![The new budget in the list, open, with its planned, actual and available totals.](https://jaah.app/web/image/9704-7103c9f7/budgets-first-budget-budgets_list_new-en.png)

## What you have seen {#what-you-have-seen}

A budget is a period, a side of the profit and loss, and lines pinned to analytic accounts with a planned amount. Once it is in service, the books fill in the rest. The user guide goes further: [Generate budgets in one step](generate-budgets) creates a whole year at once, [Follow spending against a budget](follow-a-budget) finds the lines near or over their ceiling and the entries behind them, and [Revise, close or cancel a budget](revise-close-or-cancel-a-budget) changes a budget without losing what was first promised. [How budget figures are counted](how-budget-figures-are-counted) explains which entries a line counts.

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- Source: https://jaah.app/docs/budgets/first-budget
- Updated: 2026-10-23
- Version: Budgets 19.0.1.1.1
- Verified: 2026-10-23